


And the Canadian Shack

by antonomasia09



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Back Door Malfunction, Canadian Shack, Gen, Reluctant Hero
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-24 14:37:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7512068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antonomasia09/pseuds/antonomasia09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's trouble on a routine mission, and Ezekiel is the only one who can get them home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Canadian Shack

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KiaraSayre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/gifts).



> Proud to be continuing the legacy of the [Canadian shack trope](http://fanlore.org/wiki/101_Ways_To_End_Up_In_A_Canadian_Shack)!

“Of all the times for the back door to malfunction,” Stone grumbled, picking himself up off the floor. He was cradling his left arm, which he had landed on in an attempt to avoid falling on top of Cassandra. Serving as a cushion for Ezekiel probably hadn’t helped either.

Cassandra was in much worse shape, on her hands and knees beside him. There was a worrying amount of blood spilling from the cut on her forehead where she’d struck a table after flying out the door. She was murmuring to herself as well, but it sounded more like random bits of mathematical proofs than actual coherent sentences.

Ezekiel had to admit, he agreed with Stone’s assessment, although he wasn’t exactly surprised; the mission had been a botched job from the start. They’d managed to snatch a magical Olemic were-jaguar figurine out of some rich old guy’s private collection, more by accident than any talent on their parts, but not before the mansion’s security system had gone off.

He refused to take the blame for that, by the way. How could he have guessed that the paranoid old coot would have installed both a motion detector _and_ a pressure sensor? That was just silly, nobody did that.

Well, apparently this guy had. And with armed guards closing in, they’d been forced to run through an unstable inter-dimensional doorway, which, instead of depositing them in the Annex, had sent them here. Wherever here was.

Ezekiel looked around. Here was a log cabin with a grove of evergreens out the window. As cabins went, it was decorated nicely enough, Ezekiel supposed, with a quilt-covered couch and a large stone fireplace (currently unlit). Not well-insulated, though, and it was cold outside. No electricity either, he noted unhappily.

On the bright side, there was a whole shelf full of canned beans and peaches and Spam. Well, the peaches were nice at least. And he could still feel the figurine in his pocket, so it wasn’t all for nothing.

Speaking of pockets. He reached into his sweater and pulled out his phone, hoping that there would miraculously be cell service in the middle of the forest. Turned out his luck was continuing to run bad today — when he tried to wake the mobile up it just flashed a low battery warning at him and shut itself down.

Damn. He shouldn’t have wasted so much battery life playing Angry Birds this morning.

“Anybody got a working phone?” he asked. Stone shook his head, carefully pulled his out, and held it up so Ezekiel could see the cracked screen.

Cassandra didn’t seem to have heard the question. “Cassie?” Stone prompted, touching her shoulder gently.

Finally, she looked at him. “For every integer _p_ there exists a constant _c p_ so that any _p_ -degenerate graph _G_ on _n_ vertices has Ramsey number at most _c p_ _n_ ,” she said.

“…okay.” Stone looked worried. “She has a concussion, and I’m not liking all this blood.”

Ezekiel didn’t like it either. Blood was meant to stay inside of people. Especially Cassandra. And Stone. And Baird, Jenkins, and Flynn.

He grabbed the quilt off the couch. “You’ve got a pocket knife, right?”

Stone nodded and tossed it over. Ezekiel did his best to cut off a few strips of cloth. The results weren’t pretty, but they didn’t need to be.

Between the two of them, they coaxed Cassandra into a sitting position, but the flow of maths continued. “Um, Stone?” Ezekiel said.

“Yeah, I see it,” Stone murmured, stroking Cassandra’s back. Where her hands had been, flowers were now growing out of the neat wooden floorboards.

Ezekiel crouched slightly off to her left side, figuring it would be a bad idea to be in her line of sight, and carefully wrapped the cloth around her head. It turned out he was right; when he pulled the bandage tight, her monologue stuttered, and a fireball impacted the bookshelf she was staring at.

Stone insisted on splinting his arm himself, using a non-smoldering piece of the shattered bookshelf and some more strips of quilt.

“Okay, this is bad,” Ezekiel said once Stone finished.

“Yeah, you think?”

Fine, so it wasn’t the most insightful comment, but Ezekiel was having a bad day. “Do you think Jenkins will be able to find us?” he asked.

Stone sighed. “I dunno. If Cassie was in the Annex with him, she could probably calculate where we ended up based on the energy surge that caused the door to leap. Flynn could too, maybe, but he and Baird aren’t due back for another three days. We can’t wait that long.” He cast a meaningful look at the couch, which was now dancing a waltz with the table.

“So what do you want to do?”

“You’re going to have to get to the nearest town and find a phone. Call Jenkins and hope he’s fixed the back door by then.”

“Whoa, hang on,” Ezekiel objected. “We have no idea how far away a town might be, it’s freezing out there, and I don’t speak hillbilly. Why can’t you go?”

“Because I have a broken arm, you idiot,” Stone snapped. “Do you have any idea how much that hurts?”

Ezekiel didn’t, actually. It was a point of pride for him that he’d pulled off some incredibly dangerous stunts without so much as a sprained wrist.

“Besides,” Stone added, “We’re in Quebec. I know you know some French.”

Ezekiel grimaced. Nobody was supposed to know about that — Stone was the language and art and history guy, Ezekiel was the tech and creative acquisitions guy, and Cassandra was the maths and magic girl. That was how they worked. But Stone had caught Ezekiel reading a French manuscript over his shoulder once, and just wouldn’t let it go.

Hang on. “How do you know we’re in Quebec?” Ezekiel asked.

Stone pointed to the forest out the window. “I recognized the specific varieties of trees from the landscape paintings of Canadian artist Allan Edson,” he explained.

Ezekiel stared at him. “Of course you did.”

The idea of leaving them alone while injured felt…wrong. As did the idea of wandering around in a forest probably teeming with bears and wolves and dingos and moose. Stone was right, though. They needed Jenkins, and Ezekiel was their best chance of reaching him.

So Ezekiel set off into the woods armed with nothing but the remains of the quilt and a pocketful of quarters, courtesy of Stone. Ezekiel needed to teach that man the wonders of credit cards and Apple Pay. At the moment, though, he was grateful for Stone’s caveman-like tendencies.

He’d thought it was cold inside. But outside, in the biting wind, in clothes more suited to the light air conditioning of the Library, it was freezing. He thought longingly of the fireplace, but forced himself to head down the winding driveway instead, detouring briefly to land a satisfying kick at an ancient rusted snow blower parked a few meters away from the cabin.

He needed a distraction. Heist planning? Not appealing at the moment. Museum inventory? Could work. Victoria and Albert Museum in London, alphabetical inventory by wing. Go.

By the time he got to something that resembled an actual road, he was up to Majolica Tureen With Duck and Hare on Lid. He mentally paused the list, and considered which way to go. Both directions seemed equally bleak and desolate, and he wasn’t actually sure whether he was facing north, south, east, or west at the moment.

A quick coin flip determined that he should turn right, and also nearly lost the quarter because his fingers were so numb. Before putting it away, though, he scratched a large X on a tree to mark the turn-off. Some breadcrumbs to scatter along his trail would have been even nicer, he thought.

It was easy to lose track of time, trudging along in silence punctuated only by his footsteps and increasingly-labored breathing. The sun was almost directly overhead and his stomach was growling by the time he finished the Victoria and Albert Museum catalogue. He took a moment to wonder if Cassandra had accidentally transformed Stone into anything amusing yet before moving on to the Musée d’Orsay. Finally, at Camille Pissarro’s _A Corner of the Garden at the Hermitage, Pontoise_ , he began seeing signs of civilization.

Well, if you could call a single main street featuring not much more than a general store, petrol station, restaurant, and a sign reading “Bienvenue à Saint-Odilo, Population 127” civilization. At least the petrol station had a payphone out front.

Ezekiel dropped two quarters into the slot and went to dial Jenkins’ number. And then realized abruptly that he didn’t actually know it. It was programmed into his phone, after all; no need to memorize it.

Crap.

He hit the coin return button and scooped his quarters back up. Plan B, then: recharge the mobile phone. Step 1: find a Starbucks with one of those tabletop wireless charging ring things.

From the phone booth, he could see every building in town. There was not a single Starbucks, let alone one with tabletop chargers. And he wasn’t liking the odds of finding an iPhone power cord he could borrow from amongst the local residents. They were probably still using telegraphs out here.

Okay, Plan C: find a computer, email Jenkins, and pray that Jenkins actually checks his email.

This plan was already looking promising — the town did have a little library. And — he checked his watch — it was around two o’clock on a Friday, so it should be open.

It was amazing how welcoming the library felt to him, even though it wasn’t _the_ Library. The warm blast of air that hit him as he walked in made him sigh with relief, as did the smell of old leather and paper and ink.

The only other person on the main floor of the library was the clerk, who looked at him curiously, but said nothing as he made his way over to the table holding two ’90’s-era Intel computers.

Finally! The first bit of luck he’d had all day: the computer had a built-in microphone. He didn’t stop to question his good fortune, just opened a web browser window (Internet Explorer. Ugh.)

Attempting to download Skype triggered a pop-up window asking for an administrator password — or at least that’s what Ezekiel assumed, since his French vocabulary consisted more of romance and food than technology-related terminology. That wasn’t a problem, though; Ezekiel Jones could hack a computer with his eyes closed. It was a little trickier to get around Skype’s demands for an operating system later than Windows 98, but still nothing he couldn’t handle.

There! Skype was downloaded and installed, and Ezekiel logged on. He couldn’t call Jenkins directly, since the man insisted on using a rotary phone from, like, the Bronze Age, but he should be able to reach Baird.

Crossing his fingers, Ezekiel hit the call button. A loud RING resounded in the library, making him cringe and scramble to lower the volume on the computer. The lady at the front desk glared at him pointedly, until he gave her an apologetic smile.

The ringing continued until, just as Ezekiel was ready to give up, the call connected. Sound but no video.

Baird’s voice was the most amazing thing he’d ever heard in his life. “This really isn’t a good time right now, Jones,” she said.

In the background, there was a lot of grunting going on, and some low moaning. The grunting sounded like Flynn, but the moaning sounded like…

“Are you fighting zombies?” Ezekiel whispered. “I thought we agreed you guys weren’t allowed to fight zombies without the rest of us there.”

“We didn’t do it on purpose,” Baird said, breathless, but with a definite edge of annoyance. “It turns out the pest control problem in this town was being caused by a magical chalice reanimating the dead.”

An explosion thundered right next to her, momentarily dissolving the call to static. When it reconnected, Flynn was yelling something indecipherable, and she was breathing heavily. “Why did you call anyway?” she asked.

“We’re having some problems of our own,” Ezekiel said. “Do you happen to remember Jenkins’ phone number?” He grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a pen from the table in preparation.

There was a pause on the other end of the line with nothing but feet pounding on gravel for a moment. Then, incredulous, “You don’t know Jenkins’ number?”

“Hey, my day hasn’t been all that spectacular either,” Ezekiel muttered defensively. “Do you know it or not?”

Baird rattled off a string of numbers, which Ezekiel copied down.

“Thanks!” he said.

“Hang on, weren’t you all supposed to be back at the Library by now?” Baird asked.

“Ah. Yeah. Bad day, like I said,” Ezekiel answered, then added, “Don’t worry about it.” Not that it would make a difference; Baird worried about them all constantly anyway.

“Do you guys need any help?” she asked. “Flynn and I can be there as soon as we finish taking care of this.”

“Nah, it’s okay. Jenkins’ number was all we needed.”

“If you’re sure…”

“I am, thanks. Gotta go,” he said.

“Be safe,” she said, and hung up.

He didn’t want to leave the library’s warmth, but the glare the clerk was directing at him at this point was probably going to vaporize him any second. He offered her a brief, “Désolé,” then braced himself before stepping back out into the cold and hurrying over to the payphone.

Ezekiel punched the numbers in as quickly as he could, and bounced on the balls of his feet impatiently waiting for Jenkins to pick up.

“Hello? Who is this?” came the vaguely annoyed greeting a moment later.

“Jenkins!” Ezekiel exclaimed.

“Mr. Jones? Where are you? Are you alright?”

“Yes, I’m fine, but the others are both hurt. I’m in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in Quebec, according to Stone,” Ezekiel answered. “Do you have the back door working?”

“I believe so,” Jenkins said. “But you know how temperamental the Library has been lately, and I’m still not sure what caused the problem in the first place. I wouldn’t take a chance on having it open for more than a few seconds. Are Ms. Cillian and Mr. Stone with you?”

“They’re in a cabin a few miles away,” Ezekiel said. “You should be able to find them by focusing in on the most powerful source of magic in the area – that will be Cassandra. She’s having issues controlling her powers at the moment.”

“I see,” Jenkins said, unflappably calm as always. “In that case, you’re going to have to find a way to neutralize her magic before she comes through the door, to avoid any unpleasant interactions which may destabilize it again.”

“How do we do that?”

“Any sort of electrical insulation should do the trick. It’s actually quite interesting, the similarities between electrical and magical energies. Nikola Tesla once did a study…”

Ezekiel threw up his hands. “Where do you expect me to find insulation?” he interrupted. Then a thought struck. “Actually, never mind,” he said. “I have an idea.”

“Excellent,” Jenkins said.

“Give me two hours to get back to the others, and another half hour to get ready.”

“Certainly, Mr. Jones,” Jenkins said. “Good luck.”

Before heading back, Ezekiel made a quick stop at the petrol station convenience store, and spent his remaining quarters on a couple of Tastykake krimpets, which he ate while walking. It was times like these that he missed Australia; he would have killed for a pack of Tim Tams.

The trip felt infinitely shorter now that Ezekiel knew where he was going. In no time at all he reached the tree he’d marked earlier, and turned off down the driveway.

There it was, just where he’d left it: the old rusty snow blower out front, with big rubber tires.

Ezekiel hesitated at the doorway to the cabin, unsure of what he would find inside. A quick check of his watch told him he only had twenty-five minutes left, though, so he steeled his nerves and cautiously poked his head in.

It was raining inside the cabin, and a pair of deer were drinking tea together at the table, which had settled a few metres away from the door. Cassandra was pretty much exactly in the same spot she had been when Ezekiel left hours ago, but Stone was nowhere to be seen.

“Stone?” Ezekiel called quietly, desperately hoping that neither of the deer had, until recently, been a Librarian.

“Over here,” came the response from behind the couch.

Ezekiel breathed a sigh of relief. “I got through to Jenkins,” he reported. “He’ll be opening the door in a few minutes, for just a couple of seconds. I need to borrow your knife again.”

“Why?”

“Because in order to get Cassandra through she’s going to have to be covered in rubber from the tires of the snowblower out front. Something about insulation and magic. I honestly stopped listening by that point.”

Stone popped his head up just enough to glare pointedly at Ezekiel, but he tossed his knife over willingly enough. Ezekiel snatched it up and ran back outside to begin hacking at the tires.

Unsurprisingly, Stone took good care of his knives. It didn’t take long to pry off the hubcaps and produce four long dirty strips of rubber. Seven minutes left until Jenkins opened the door.

Ezekiel dragged the tire strips over to the cabin two at a time. Then, holding one piece in front of him as a shield while he kicked the others ahead, he carefully entered and made his way over to Cassandra.

She barely spared him a glance, just continued to recite “121393, 196418, 317811…”

He started to reach out towards her, but hesitated. “I could use a diversion,” he told Stone. “Just in case.”

Stone let out a loud sigh. “How did I guess.” Without further warning, a can of Spam sailed over Ezekiel’s head and landed in front of Cassandra. Or, rather, it would have landed, except it was suddenly encased in a soap bubble, and gently floated back in the direction it had come from.

Ezekiel took advantage of Cassandra’s momentary distraction to drape one of the rubber strips around her shoulders, and another over her legs. “Sorry,” he muttered, though she showed no sign of minding.

He perched the third tire on her head, like a ridiculous hat, and stepped back to examine his work. Hopefully this would be enough to protect her for the few seconds it took to pass through the portal.

Suddenly, he remembered the figurine in his pocket. It had magical properties too — could that have been what destabilized the door before? Just in case, he rolled it up in the last strip of rubber.

Not a moment too soon, as the doorway flared to life. “Come on!” he called to Stone, and scooped Cassandra up. She didn’t vaporize him instantly, which he took as a good sign.

Stone needed no encouragement. He vaulted over the couch and ran for it, Ezekiel right behind.

And then they were in the blessedly warm, dry Library, and Jenkins was rushing over, Bathsheba’s Oil of Healing in his hands.

Ezekiel half-dropped, half-laid Cassandra down (she was heavier than she looked, okay?), and helped Jenkins pour a drop in her mouth. Within moments, the bleeding stopped and she blinked up at them, confused but aware of her surroundings.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Oh, you know,” Ezekiel said. “The usual.”

“Jones saved the day,” Stone admitted grudgingly.

“Oh no no no,” Ezekiel protested. “Don’t say things like that. Because then you’ll expect me to do it again, and that’s just not happening.”

“I don’t believe that,” Cassandra said, smiling at him. “Thank you, Ezekiel.” She wrapped her arms around him quickly, then sagged back down before he could protest.

“Let’s get you to somewhere you can rest more comfortably,” Jenkins suggested to her. She gratefully accepted his help standing up, and into the small area where he had a cot set up for late nights.

“You did good, man,” Stone said, patting him on the shoulder, and then wincing when the gesture jostled his own arm. “Wanna drive me to the hospital?”

“Sorry, I’m done with good deeds for the day. For the whole year, actually.”

“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that,” Stone said, and went to call a taxi.

Ezekiel waited until the others were gone before smiling. No way were they right. Ezekiel Jones, a hero?

He pushed away the memory of Cassandra’s proud grin, and wandered off to see if the chupacabra knew how to make any traditional Australian deserts.

**Author's Note:**

> Cassandra recites the Erdős–Burr conjecture and part of the Fibonacci sequence.
> 
> [This is the tureen at the V&A Museum](http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/album/image/2696) and [this is the painting at the Musée d'Orsay](http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/painting/commentaire_id/a-corner-of-the-garden-15705.html?cHash=3a487ef82e).


End file.
